Lab Alumni

Farrah Kudus, M.A.

B.Sc. (Honours) McMaster University 2016

Now a student at the Faculty of Law at Queen’s University.

Farrah is interested in the interdisciplinary nature of human memory, along with its effects on other cognitive functions, such as decision-making. Her undergraduate thesis explored the willingness of trauma patients to potentially use memory-dampening medications as a treatment for psychological trauma. For her master’s thesis, she used behavioural and ERP methods to study motivated attention in younger and older adults.

Now a clinical psychologist (supervised practice) at Broadview Psychology in Waterloo.

Leann examined prospective memory, which involves remembering to perform specific actions at future points in time. As older adults often report difficulties with this type of memory, Leann’s Ph.D. dissertation compared different strategies that might improve performance on a lab-based test of prospective memory.

Leann’s research interests include:

Episodic future thinking

Autobiographical memory

Prospective memory

Personal goals

Laura Bianchi, B.A. (Honours)

Now a Master’s student in psychology at the University of Waterloo in the cognitive psychology program.

Laura completed her Bachelor of Arts in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. For her undergraduate thesis, she investigated how differences in frequency format affect individuals’ ability to make conditional probability estimates. Laura’s research interests are cognition and aging. She is especially interested in how memory and different aspects of the decision making process interact and change throughout the lifespan.

Ryan Marinacci, B.A. (Honours)

Now a student at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto.

Ryan completed his Bachelor of Arts in the Department of Psychology at Ryerson University. For his undergraduate thesis, he investigated how financial rewards interact with visual memory detail. He served as lab manager and was also actively involved in multiple studies investigating the effects of aging on a variety of factors such as executive functioning, acute physiological stress, temporal discounting, and prospective memory.

Ryan Williams, B.A. (Honours)
Department of Psychology

Now a Master’s student in psychology at the University of Toronto, in the cognitive neuroscience program.

Ryan was interested in how lifespan changes in motivational orientations affect attentional sensitivity to gains and losses. He investigated the patterns of electrophysiological activity generated by younger and older adults with respect to various networks of visual attention as well as the process of investigating how such neural markers of attention are influenced by monetary incentives.

Ryan’s research interests include:

Effects of lifespan changes on sensitivity to motivational information

Neural recruitment strategies used to compensate for age-related declines

Performance monitoring event-related potentials (ERP) and their relationship to adjustments in behavioural performance

Katherine Storey, B.A. (Honours)

Kate completed her undergraduate studies in psychology at Ryerson. In her undergraduate thesis she investigated the effects of reward and feedback on memory encoding. Kate was also an RA in one other lab at Ryerson and at Toronto Distress Centres.